‘The Cosmopolitans,’ by Sarah Schulman

By Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Updated 5:04 pm, Thursday, April 7, 2016

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Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman

‘The Cosmopolitans,’ by Sarah Schulman

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“The Cosmopolitans,” Sarah Schulman’s ninth novel, takes place in Greenwich Village in 1958, a neighborhood of artists and Italians, queers and immigrants and refugees from the middle-class imagination. The book is lavish in detail and offers an informal history of the Village, and especially one particular intersection — near the Cedar Tavern, where the Abstract Expressionists brawl; and the Albert Hotel, where queens pay their rent in charm; and an art gallery where Greta Garbo may have conducted an lesbian affair in her chauffeur-driven Bentley.

The novel centers on the relationship of Bette and Earl, two friends who met 30 years before at the 24-hour diner where they worked, and who have lived side by side ever since. Bette is a white woman from small-town Ohio who fled to New York after the man she thought she was in love with betrayed her. She now works as a secretary, but her life revolves around her nightly dinners with Earl, who lives next door. Earl is a black gay Shakespearean actor forced to play the stereotypical supporting roles that are the only work available for black actors of the time. During the day, he works at a slaughterhouse because it’s the only job that will keep him.

Bette is content with her life with Earl — their continuous conversations about theater, and the theater of daily life. Earl, though, feels the weight of racism and homophobia on a daily level, and when he betrays Bette, the entire structure of the book is shaken. What had been a fairly straightforward historical novel becomes a comedy of manners, a morality play, a musical-in-waiting, an instructional film about the emergent advertising industry, an investigation of the romance of the city, and a cautionary tale.

Every scene is meticulously choreographed, overwrought in its use of direct address, just like the plays that Bette and Earl are constantly discussing. (Schulman, known mostly for her novels and nonfiction, is also a prolific playwright.)

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“The Cosmopolitans” is modeled after Honoré de Balzac’s 1846 novel “Cousin Bette,” a classic of 19th century French realism. But “The Cosmopolitans” shimmers where it departs from the conventions of realism to indict not just structural homophobia, racism and misogyny but also the structures of writing that further these societal ills. Schulman accomplishes all this with deadpan humor and startling precision.

Ultimately, “The Cosmopolitans” addresses many of the themes that have motivated Schulman as a writer over the past three decades, in particular the refusal of families of origin to recognize the humanity of their queer children, the harm this diminishment enacts, and the continuing pattern of abuse when those who are harmed turn their anger on one another. “The Cosmopolitans” is also a deep indictment of structural racism. In order to force Earl to be accountable, and thus regain the relationship she treasures, Bette masters the schemes of racist pandering and heterosexual supremacy — the very behaviors she’s spent her life avoiding. That she is successful in her quest speaks both to the persistence of platonic love and the impossibility of ethical conduct in an unethical world. While “The Cosmopolitans” is undoubtedly about the social strictures of the 1950s, its lessons are no less relevant today.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is most recently the author of a memoir, “The End of San Francisco.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com